Description

Zak McKracken is a tabloid reporter (and not a very good one at that). After having a psychedelic dream one day, Zak realizes that something is wrong -- space aliens are dumbifying the general public through the telephone system. Zak must stop this, but he can't do it alone. After finding a strange crystal, Zak manages to get the help of the anthropologist Annie and her friends, Melissa and Leslie. The four unlikely heroes must now figure out a way to destroy the dumbifying devices and save the Earth.

Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders is a third-person puzzle-solving adventure similar in gameplay to Lucasfilm's breakthrough title Maniac Mansion. The player chooses verb commands (Open, Pick Up, Give, etc.; there are no Look or Talk commands) to interact with the game world. The game features up to four controllable protagonists; it is possible to switch between them at any time after they have been introduced, and also exchange inventory items if the characters are in the same location. The game can be described as a "globe-trotting" adventure, since the heroes are required to travel to different exotic countries and even leave the Earth for a while in order to complete it. Some of the puzzles are optional or can be solved in different ways.

The FM Towns version has VGA graphics with 256 colors and higher-quality music and sound effects.

GOG release comes with two versions of the game that install simultaneously. One is FM Towns version with updated graphics, while the other is marked as Floppy version which is the old DOS version of a game.

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Copy protection

All versions of Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, except for the FM Towns release, require the player to enter copy protection codes when leaving the USA, but not when re-entering it or when at an airport in another country. After entering five incorrect entries in a row, Zak is put into Pirate Jail and the game is automatically over. The codes were printed on dark red paper in order to make it harder to copy them.

Fangames

The first fan project to enter development was "Zak McKracken 2", later renamed Zak McKracken and the Alien Rockstars, which was started in 1996. Because a lot of people joined and left the team over the course of its development, the game progressed slowly, to the point where it disappeared completely in 2001. In 2005 it was re-announced as a new project, being re-developed from scratch. The project was eventually cancelled in 2008, however, as the developers felt that Zak McKracken: Between Time and Space, a fangame that had been released in the meantime, was good enough to warrant abandoning their own project. One of the game's official websites has been archived, allowing players to download the project's original German tech-demo, however their other, zak2.de, was lost due to the use of a robots.txt file, which actively prevented its archival.

Zak McKracken: Between Time and Space was started in 2001 by fans who thought that the Zak McKracken and the Alien Rockstars project detailed above was dead. It was ultimately released in 2008

Zak Mckracken and the Lonely Sea Monster, an Adventure Game Studio remake was first announced for a July 2007 release, however it was subsequently delayed until 2008. After several years the project was confirmed to be abandoned in 2010. As of December of 2012, however, the original developer has resumed development.

Platform differences

The game was made with three different styles of graphics: the Commodore 64 multicolor style (low resolution using 256 characters and 16 colors), the higher resolution 16 color version that uses bitmaps and finally the 256 color version (same style as Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure) which seems to have only been released in Japan on the Fujitsu FM Towns system.

References

A poster of one of LucasFilm's early games, Rescue on Fractalus!, can be seen in the machine room next to a map of Earth. Like Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, it was also designed by David Fox. In the FM Towns version the Rescue on Fractalus! poster was replaced by a poster for Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure, another game David Fox was involved with alongside Ron Gilbert.

During the scene on Mars, the tune heard when playing the music cassette in the radio is by "Razor and the Scumettes". Razor is one of the original characters in Maniac Mansion, a LucasArts adventure game released the previous year.

There's a can of gasoline to be found on Mars. If the player tries to pick it up the character says it's for a different game. This is a nod to the red herring in Maniac Mansion, where there's a chainsaw in the kitchen but it's out of gas... and there is no gas in that game.

When reading the telephone inside the The Phone Company's office, it will show a four digit telephone number. This number can be called from Zak's house and a sales representative will pick up. He'll think that it is Edna again, a reference to the player calling Edna in Maniac Mansion.

Awards

Commodore Format

July 1991 (Issue 10) - listed in the A to Z of Classic Games article (Great)

Related Web Sites

LucasArts' Secret History (A multi-article feature about the game by the LucasArts news site, The International House of Mojo. The feature article includes an unscored review, short responses written by members of the site's community, trivia, and a transcription of the original hint book.)

ScummVM (Get "Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders", as well as many other adventure games, to run on modern systems by using ScummVM, a legal and free program.)